Scaling Sales, Shifting Mindsets & Building a Global Business with Alan Versteeg
In this in-depth conversation, host Mark Hayward sits down with Alan Versteeg—an engineer turned sales management expert and co-founder of Growth Matters International. Alan shares his personal journey from engineering to mastering sales, the critical importance of mindset in business, and actionable strategies for scaling a company while ensuring that your business works for you, not the other way around.
Key Discussion Topics:
- The Business Mindset:
- How to ensure that your business serves you instead of owning you.
- The evolution from working in your business to having your business work for you.
- Sales Techniques & Strategies:
- The importance of relevance on sales calls using the “initial value promise” approach.
- How to overcome the “feature advantage benefit avalanche” by setting context and establishing credibility from the very first interaction.
- Understanding the role of the reticular activating system in filtering sales pitches.
- Building & Leading a Team:
- Transitioning from a one-person operation to building a management layer.
- The significance of hiring—especially the first hire (Alan’s executive assistant)—to free you up for growth.
- Embracing leadership without losing your entrepreneurial passion.
- Learning from Failure:
- Alan’s candid recounting of past bankruptcies and the lessons learned about cash flow, legal advice, and the importance of building demand before product creation.
- How overcoming failures has been essential in developing a resilient and growth-focused mindset.
- Global Business Growth:
- Strategies for expanding internationally—even when you’re not physically in the target country.
- Leveraging technology (like Zoom) for meaningful global conversations and maintaining the value of face-to-face interactions when needed.
- Quickfire Insights:
- Best decision: Hiring an executive assistant.
- Best advice received: “Treat this as a profession and keep studying it.”
- Regrets, proud moments, and a peek into Alan’s personal life (from his top math mark to his karaoke skills).
- What legacy means: Measuring life by the eulogy and the impact you leave on others.
If you found this episode insightful, be sure to subscribe and follow Business Growth Talks for more real strategies from successful entrepreneurs. You can also connect with Alan Versteeg on LinkedIn (just search for “Alan Versteeg”) to learn more about his work with Growth Matters International.
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